Mobile communication devices are becoming increasingly popular for business and personal use due to a relatively recent increase in number of services and features that the devices and mobile infrastructures support. Handheld mobile communication devices, sometimes referred to as mobile stations, are essentially portable computers having wireless capability, and come in various forms. These include Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), cellular phones and smart phones. While their reduced size is an advantage to portability, bandwidth and processing constraints of such devices present challenges to the downloading and viewing of documents, such as word processing documents, tables and images.
Electronic documents are produced using various computer programs, such as word processors, spreadsheet programs, financial software, and presentation software. It is customary to provide a “Find” command in such programs for quickly locating a search string of interest in a document, etc., without the user being required to read through the entire document.
The downloading of an entire document to a mobile communication device consumes a large amount of bandwidth, especially when the document is very large. In addition, viewing even a portion of such a downloaded document on the device consumes substantial device CPU/memory/battery resources.
For example, if a user wishes to view only a paragraph in a section in the middle of a 400-page document, the section that contains some of the default properties for the paragraph, or even the entire document, must be transmitted to the mobile communication device. Yet, the user only views a small portion of the document on the mobile communication device.
Consequently, it is known in the art to provide an attachment server to deliver on-demand content to the user of a mobile communication device in order to minimize bandwidth, and device CPU/memory usage. This content may then be viewed on the device using an attachment viewer.
Currently, the “Find” command within the attachment viewer on a mobile communication device can only find a user entered search term if the attachment content already is present on the device (i.e. it has already been retrieved/downloaded to the device).
Some document attachments can easily be in the range of several hundred pages or contain large amounts of textual information, as indicated above. For a user to be able to find all occurrences of a search term for such a large document attachment, all of the content must be retrieved to the device from the server in a sequential fashion. This is a very time consuming as well as a bandwidth and device CPU/memory intensive operation.